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50 free Great Zimbabwe trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Great Zimbabwe trivia quiz covers the largest stone ruins in precolonial southern Africa, from the first walls of the 11th century to the country that took its name in 1980. The easy questions are ones anyone with a passing interest in African history could answer: which people built it, what the walls were made of, what the name means in Shona, and which bird sits on the national flag. The harder end is for archaeology and history readers: the height and length of the Great Enclosure walls, the Conical Tower, the Portuguese captain who first recorded the name Symbaoe in 1531, the trade route to Sofala and Kilwa, the Chinese celadon and Persian bowls dug from the ruins, the German explorer who dreamed of the Queen of Sheba, the hunter who sold a soapstone bird to Cecil Rhodes, the archaeologists who proved African origins in 1905 and 1929, the Rhodesian government's censorship, and the birds South Africa returned in 1981 and 2026. Mapungubwe, Khami, Mutapa and Masvingo get questions too. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for the site, its kingdom and its investigators before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our Zimbabwe, ancient civilisations and African history quizzes next.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which people's ancestors built Great Zimbabwe?
Shona
The Karanga, a south-central Shona group, are considered the direct builders.
Q 02Near which modern Zimbabwean city do the ruins stand?
Masvingo
The city carried a colonial name honouring Queen Victoria until 1982.
Q 03What distinction does Great Zimbabwe hold in southern Africa?
Largest precolonial stone structure
The stone city spans 7.22 square kilometres.
Q 04From which century did Great Zimbabwe serve as a kingdom's capital?
13th
Settlement began around 1000 AD; the site was abandoned in the 16th or 17th century.
Q 05What binds the blocks of Great Zimbabwe's walls together?
Nothing at all
The Great Enclosure's walls rise without any mortar.
Q 06How high are the walls of the Great Enclosure?
11 m
They extend for roughly 250 metres.
Q 07What are the three architectural groups of the ruins?
Hill Complex, Valley Complex, Great Enclosure
The Hill Complex is the oldest of the three.
Q 08What stands between the inner and outer walls of the Great Enclosure?
The Conical Tower
It is 5.5 metres across and 9 metres high, and appears on Zimbabwe's coat of arms.
Q 09What peak population did a 2017 statistical study estimate for Great Zimbabwe?
No more than 10,000
Older estimates ran as high as 18,000 to 20,000; the 2017 study in PLOS ONE argued the site never held more than about 10,000 people at once.
Q 10Great Zimbabwe covered a similar area to which medieval European city?
London
The surviving stone ruins span 730 hectares.
Q 11What does the Shona word dzimba, in the name Zimbabwe, mean?
Houses
One theory reads the full name as large houses of stone; another as venerated houses.
Q 12Who first recorded the name of the ruins, as Symbaoe, in 1531?
Vicente Pegado
He was captain of the Portuguese garrison at Sofala and said the word meant court.
Q 13Roughly how many smaller stone zimbabwes have been identified across southern Africa?
More than 400
Examples include Bumbusi in Zimbabwe and Manyikeni in Mozambique.
Q 14Which earlier state did Great Zimbabwe replace as the interior's chief trading centre around 1300?
Q 21Which hunter carried off a Zimbabwe Bird in 1889 and sold it to a Cape magnate?
Willi Posselt
He paid a local man named Andizibi with blankets and some other articles.
Q 22In which Cape Town house did the buyer of the 1889 bird display it?
Groote Schuur
He put stone replicas three times the size on the gates of his English house near Cambridge.
Q 23What did South Africa receive in 1981 in exchange for returning four Zimbabwe Birds?
An insect collection from Harare
The fifth bird stayed in Cape Town until 2026.
Mapungubwe
That predecessor lay south of the Limpopo in today's South Africa.
Q 15Which two exports flowed from Great Zimbabwe to the Indian Ocean via Swahili ports?
Gold and ivory
Traders travelled the Save and Runde rivers, possibly by canoe, to reach ports such as Sofala.
Q 16Which Swahili port most likely funnelled Chinese ceramics to Great Zimbabwe?
Kilwa Kisiwani
Longquan green-glazed stoneware and blue-and-white porcelain of the 14th and 15th centuries were found.
Q 17Coins from which region have been excavated at Great Zimbabwe?
Arabia
Chinese pottery shards and glass beads were also found.
Q 18How many soapstone Zimbabwe Birds are the most important artefacts from the site?
Eight
Theodore Bent recorded six large and two small, with pedestals suggesting there had been more.
Q 19Which bird do the Zimbabwe Birds most likely represent?
Bateleur eagle
In Shona culture the bateleur is a good omen and a messenger of god.
Q 20Roughly how tall are the soapstone bird sculptures themselves?
40 cm
They stood on columns more than 90 centimetres tall.
Q 24A pedestal of one bird was sold to a museum in which city in 1907?
Berlin
It was reunited with the upper part for an exhibition in Belgium in 1997.
Q 25Which German explorer recorded the ruins in 1871 while searching for biblical Ophir?
Karl Mauch
He was shown the site by Adam Render.
Q 26Which biblical figure did Mauch link the ruins to?
The Queen of Sheba
He even claimed a wooden lintel was Lebanese cedar brought by Phoenicians.
Q 27Which patron funded Theodore Bent's 1891 excavation at the ruins?
Cecil Rhodes
Bent's book The Ruined Cities of Mashonaland credited Phoenicians or Arabs as builders.
Q 28Who carried out the first scientific excavations at the site in 1905–1906?
David Randall-MacIver
His book Medieval Rhodesia concluded the builders were ancestors of the Shona.
Q 29Which archaeologist confirmed the site's Bantu origin after a twelve-day visit in 1929?
Gertrude Caton Thompson
She announced her findings to the British Association meeting in Johannesburg.
Q 30By which decade had the site's African origin become scholarly consensus?
1950s
Rhodesia's white government nonetheless kept pressuring archaeologists to deny it.